Television

Crossing Over the Line

On last night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart presented clips from the ongoing, 24-7 obscenity that is cable news coverage of the Terri Schiavo case. The Crooks & Liars weblog offers the five-minute segment in QuickTime and Windows Media formats. To give you an idea of how bad the infotainment cesspool has become, a Fox News morning show invited Crossing Over TV psychic John Edward in studio to talk about it. John Edward: I do believe that the soul, the consciousness, can communicate when they're in ... (read more)

2005/03/25

The Geek Who Saved Christmas

I've been accused this week of being obsessive and creepy over an article I wrote several years ago about Janie Porche, the effusively perky real-life Apple Switch spokesmodel. I know I titled the piece "Stalking Janie Porche," but I'm surprised that these bloggers took that literally. If I said that I was hungry enough to eat a horse, would they report me to PETA? Porche, who now has her own weblog, read the article and sent me a friendly e-mail in response to a visitor's comment that included ... (read more)

2005/03/22

Don't Tune in Tomorrow

On March 31, SoapCity is cancelling a great TV subscription service: commercial-free program downloads. The service, which required Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, offered shows from the last four weeks for download over the Web, charging $9.95 a month or $1.99 per episode. Digital-rights management expired the files after four weeks. Considering the popularity of TV show DVDs and illegally traded episodes on file-sharing services, it seems like a no-brainer to milk a few more ... (read more)

2005/02/25

Mark Evanier: ... many years ago, around the time I started edging into the TV business, I attended a lecture by a very accomplished, successful producer ... a man with many prestigious credits. He told us that we had to recognize and avoid what he called "The Marley Ideas" -- notions so dreadful that they were dead from the moment of conception. As an example, he told us that one TV network was then considering an idea so terrible, so guaranteed to fail, that everyone involved with it should ... (read more)

2005/02/20

Mark Evanier on Johnny Carson

The comic book and TV writer Mark Evanier writes News From Me, a great pop culture weblog that has been wall-to-wall Johnny Carson for days. He appears to have found every interesting retrospective and trivial tidbit about Carson in the pro and online media, adding some of his own observations: I met Carson three times, I think, plus he called me once on the phone after his retirement to thank me for some information I'd relayed to his secretary. He was always disarmingly gracious. People ... (read more)

2005/01/29